Review: Hero Forge (part 2)
Updated: Feb 3, 2023
last time we took a look at what Hero Forge is all about. We discussed all the awesome things you can do to make your custom mini. Now we are going to take a look at the 3 Minis I had made and shipped to us from Hero Forge. We will talk about the order process and how everything turned out.
I started designing some characters on Hero Forge and there were so many ways I could have taken this. What I settled on was designing my family via Hero Forge. My wife, daughter and myself all shrunken down to 1:60 scale. I started with our daughter (pictured above). She loves playing in our garden and learning about animals so I went with a fairy/druid vibe for her. I wanted to try some of the accessories like the wings on her back and the spell coming from her left hand. I also chose a more busy base to see how all of it would come out together. I was going to have hers printed in color plastic. Things I was looking for are the colors and the detail in the plastic. I also was looking to see how the skin tones came through.
Next up was my wife. Mary is great and shortly after we first met she got this cat Henry that passed away in 2021. I wanted to include dear old Henry as a tribute to him Henry was a little more "fluffy" than the cat I could add to the base but as Tenacious D put it "This is just a tribute!". Paging through the thousands of things to add I found a giant goblet and well why not. If you have a giant goblet you'll need something to put in it so a wine bottle fit the bill. I used a color pallet similar to our daughters outfit to check for consistency and my wife loved it when her and our daughter were on the same outfit. I used the halfling for our daughter and the elf for my wife that seemed to fit the bill proportionately and then I made some minor tweaks with the
I wanted to include dear old Henry as a tribute to him Henry was a little more "fluffy" than the cat I could add
There are a lot of options in Hero Forge and they made it easy to figure out where you made modifications. On the menu and sub-menu of anything you changed or added there will be a faint blue circle so that you can keep better track of where you got those wings or added that backpack. The interface is so intuitive I had our friends 9 year old over and he made a full character in 10 minutes. You can find this gem on our Instagram as a video.
What happens when you are finished designing that sweet mini? Well you can choose from several options to print it out. You can choose from Plastic, Premium Plastic, color plastic, Bronze, and for print at home you can choose the STL file or if you live in a digital world you can also get a digital mini to use on Tabletop Simulator(more platforms coming soon). The next day I got the digital proofs from Hero Forge to look over and had 24 hours to fix anything. Two weeks after that I received an email saying they were shipped. It took about a week to get them via UPS. The whole process took just about 4 weeks from order to delivery.
So how did they turn out? Well the 2 pieces i printed in color plastic turned out good. If you do not have the time and patience to paint then you can get these. Your mini will be ready to hit the table when you pull it out of the box. However some of the detail is lost in the process. They look a little blurry when you do a side by side with the screen grab. Overall though I am satisfied with how it turned out. I might give my wife some eyeballs with a bit of paint but other than that it looks great.
The unpainted mini I had done also turned out really good. the mini had a lot of physical details that I wanted to see and its going to be a fun one to paint (If I ever can find the time for that). The process for buying and designing my own minis was great. It takes a while but when you get the final product (a mini that you designed from the ground up) its worth the wait.
The flexibility and vastness of the customization are truly hard to fathom from words alone. Go to heroforge.com and just start creating characters. In Hero Forge part 2 we are going to take a look at some of the actual minis that I have ordered and see what they look like, what I did to create them, and how the ordering process went. Also in the next week or two we will be posting on our Instagram several walk-troughs and live videos.
Here are the photos we took of the printed minis from Hero Forge.
The miniatures used in this article were provided to Bert's Tabletop Games for review purposes by Hero Forge.
